Whoever will or won’t get those two hectares will have to remain anonymous to me for now. I’ll have missed a good portion of the story by getting distracted by thoughts of how it happened that this woman became my best friend. A friend who, like the others I would like to meet again, is impossible to write about objectively, because love gets in the way. Salinger isn’t the only one who noticed this contradiction; Seymour: An Introduction has an epigraph from Kafka: “ … I write about them with steadfast love (even now, while I write it down, this, too, becomes false) but varying ability, and this varying ability does not hit off the real actors loudly and correctly but loses itself dully in this love that will never be satisfied with the ability and therefore thinks it is protecting the actors by preventing this ability from exercising itself.”
I could have spent my weekend alone in the quiet, but I invited her here, and I suspect I’ll have to put Salinger aside on the windowsill for the duration. The only things my friend has ever read are Zoshchenko’s stories, and those not very carefully. When she needs to express herself, she resorts to Russian; she came late to Lithuanian. She’s the sort of person who constantly changes channels while watching television, clicking away at the remote control; I can’t stand that. (We’ll go to bed without watching The Wrestler; it’s obvious what a sbornik, a scumbag, Rourke is, she’ll say.) Her expenses never correspond to her income: she used to say that God had created too little money for the world, so she was borrowing it from the devil. She has no concept of the boundaries of “decent” conversation, crossing them at will. (“If I had to choose between oral sex or jellied carp, I’d go with the fish.”) She’s always playing with words, switching them around, wrong-footing you at just the right moment. (“The exception disproves the rule!”) She likes to steal amusing signs from public places. The most valuable item in her collection is a sign she took from a changing room at a swimming pooclass="underline" “Please refrain from using the hairdryers for hair anywhere but on your head.” She’s scheduled to have a valve replaced in her heart this year. She’s still waiting, though; the same way I’d wait in a store for them to exchange a pair of shoes for one that’s my size. She’s always imagined she’d die the way her grandfather did. From a heart attack. Playing solitaire on a glassed-in veranda in the evening light. And, in the garden beyond the glass, as on a computer screen, the neighbor’s grandchildren running about. Rain water in a bucket stirred by a fleck of dust. Winter apples strewn here and there by the windowsill. Three zucchini crocodiles and a fattened pumpkin lying on the nearby couch. Her knees bending slowly, she starts sliding sideways from her wicker chair. Her startled cat leaps from her lap into eternity, while a card falls out of her relaxing fingers.
I knew a lawyer in Chicago who smoked the same cigarettes as my friend — Parliaments. Every Sunday, dressed in a brown suit and a white shirt, and carrying a cane, he would come to a pseudo-Lithuanian restaurant where I worked. When people say that you can find every culture in the world in America, I always say, “You mean, you can find every culture’s surrogate there.” And on Sundays I used to fill in for a Lithuanian student who worked in that supposedly Lithuanian restaurant. The waitresses said that the lawyer had gone bankrupt. He would barely touch the duck he always ordered. The man would cut his bird up into little pieces, as if there were a diamond ring hidden in the roast, and then, after a half hour of this, with a disappointed look on his face, he would smoke a cigarette — always sitting at the same table in the smoking section. Once, without even finishing his cigarette, he leaped up, threw some cash on the table, and ran out into the street to hail a yellow cab. I’d already worked about three Sunday shifts in that restaurant before I found out that the lawyer was blind. I’d like to meet him again, too. I’d like to meet him again the way I sometimes want to get to the end of a movie.
Another blind person I’d like to meet again is my uncle. He started going blind when he was still a student learning Spanish and English at the Pedagogical Institute. He didn’t finish at the Institute, because back then there weren’t any tape recorders, computers, or other audio tools accessible to the blind. He went to a clinic in Odessa, and there they did the first operation — they took some skin from his lower lip and patched it over one of his eyeballs. There was an Armenian in the ward who couldn’t distinguish between gender and person in foreign languages; when he went to fetch wine, speaking Russian, he’d refer to himself in the third person feminine. When Uncle’s turn came to fetch the wine, he got lost. With one covered eye and a swollen lip. While he was walking through the courtyard of the dilapidated hospital, he saw a half-naked woman standing in an open window, leaning against the window frame. Uncle even thought that the famous Odessa Catacombs started there. “She might have been naked, that guide to the Catacombs,” he said many years later, “but I don’t remember seeing a bit of her treasure, the center of her life, if you know what I mean, below the windowsill. When I went on my way, a desert that wasn’t on the map of Ukraine spread out on the other side of the building.” Uncle didn’t carry a white cane and walked the streets of his hometown quickly, seeing everything with the eyes of memory. But, once, he knocked over a baby carriage standing on the little bridge — knocked it over with its occupant still on board. The child’s mother for some reason called Uncle impotent, and the carriage floated down the creek to the Nev